- George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker“he grim circumstances behind the death of George Washington (1732-1799), America’s first president and popularly known as the Father of the Country, are not wholly unknown. The details have been reported by historians for more than two centuries. What’s strange about this dry biographical knowledge is that it is not reported with shock and alarm and hence never conveyed to popular culture with lessons for our lives. This is because Washington’s physicians were following standard protocols when they bled him to death.” (05/15/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/george-washington-father-of-the-country-killed-by-doctors/
- The Rotten Roots of Gerrymandering
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman“Congressional redistricting — or pejoratively, gerrymandering — has dominated the headlines lately. This is a big deal in the primary-election season with an unpopular president and midterms right around the corner. Few issues provoke such animosity. Each side accuses the other of trying to stack the deck and rig the elections. … What most people refuse to understand is that if the public sees the government as a 24/7/365 bazaar offering virtually any benefit demanded of it to those with clout, then those who want what they cannot acquire through persuasion and voluntary exchange will work overtime to gain advantage from political power.” (05/15/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-the-rotten-roots-of-gerrymandering
- The US Immigration-Control Death Machine
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger“Death has always been a central feature of America’s immigration-control system. Death has become normalized. Sure, there will be the standard laments about this tragic occurrence, there will be the standard condemnations of the immigrants themselves for violating U.S. immigration laws, and there will be the standard diatribes against human traffickers who prey on people who are simply trying to survive or improve their lives through labor. But the fact remains: Death has long been an inherent part of America’s immigration-control system. In the absence of that system, all those victims would still be alive.” (05/15/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/05/15/the-u-s-immigration-control-death-machine/
- Winning? Republicans support a war that’s pummeling ‘Main Street’
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jack Hunter“If you ask President Donald Trump, he is winning the Iran war, implementing a ‘comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict,’ and making serious progress on ending the war in Ukraine. So much winning — on Main Street, in the Persian Gulf, and everywhere else. But pollsters will tell you that Americans are largely against the war in Iran and feel the president hasn’t really explained why the U.S. is there. Moreover, 60% now have an unfavorable view of our ‘iron clad’ relations with Israel, and a majority have low trust in Trump’s decision-making regarding Ukraine and Russia. These are negatives that could obviously affect his party in the approaching midterm elections.” (05/15/26)
- The Endless Search for Emergency Tariff Authority
Source: The Daily Economy
by David Hebert“The legal foundation for taxing every import into the US has now rested, at various points in the past year, on a 1977 emergency powers law, a 1974 statute designed for a monetary system that no longer exists, and — if the administration’s next move is what trade lawyers expect — a Depression-era provision that has never once been used to impose actual tariffs in almost a century. At some point, running out of legal justifications is a signal worth heeding.” (05/15/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-endless-search-for-emergency-tariff-authority/
- Plunder, War Profiteering, and Spirit Airlines
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Charles Goyette“Someone, somewhere is making a lot of money. It’s the most brazen plunder since Hillary Clinton was trading cattle futures in Little Rock. Or since Nancy Pelosi was placing stock trades. Come to think of it, there seems to be a whole lot of plunder going on in the world of politics. It’s not just oil in the ‘Age of Trump.’ As President Ronald Reagan’s budget director and a Wall Street veteran, David Stockman is a seasoned observer of political plunder. When Donald Trump suddenly offered up the suggestion that ‘we’ (the taxpayers) buy struggling Spirit Airlines, Stockman wrote a piece called, ‘Was It You, Barron? Someone Made 3.5X On The Donald’s Spirit Airlines Socialism.’ This chart shows Spirit Holdings share price spiking when Trump started his takeover talk on April 21 (and then quickly collapsing).” (05/15/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/plunder-war-profiteering-and-spirit-airlines
- Trump Accounts and the No Economist Left Behind Test
Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker“Back when George W. Bush was doing his big drive to privatize Social Security, I got upset because he was using bogus numbers that grossly exaggerated what his private accounts would yield. The basic story was that his team assumed that stocks would provide the same returns they had in prior decades, even though the price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market were far higher than in the past, and projected GDP and profit growth were much lower. Given the assumptions being used on profit growth, their assumptions on returns were virtually impossible. To illustrate this point, I developed the ‘No Economist Left Behind Test.’ … If the Bush Team could get away with promising an impossible bonanza from their accounts, privatization would look much better than it actually is. It was important to set the record straight.” (05/15/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/15/trump-accounts-and-the-no-economist-left-behind-test/
- The Trump-Xi summit was a battle of two waning superpowers
Source: spiked
by James Woudhuysen“America is in long-term decline, but it has proved more resilient than critics allow. But China too now encounters unmistakable problems. The US is growing, but saddled with burgeoning debt – and China also has trouble brewing in that domain. Of course, Trump faces domestic dissent – but so, in a very different form, does the CCP. China has long had too much housing built, is heavily indebted and is hurtling towards a demographic cliff.” (05/15/26)
- Taxpayers Still on the Hook for a Gas Tax Holiday
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye & Eric Harrison“Of course, Congress needs to find a way to ease the pain Americans feel at the pump. This is why it was so critical for lawmakers to exercise their constitutional and statutory powers to stop the military action against Iran, which led to higher gas prices. Unfortunately, Americans are paying the price for that military action in more ways than just higher gas prices.” (05/15/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/taxpayers-still-on-the-hook-for-a
- Universities’ Best Defense Against Censorship in the Public Square Is Free Inquiry
Source: The UnPopulist
by Jonathan Marks“In their otherwise valuable new book, two prominent professors acknowledge the need for diverse viewpoints on campuses but don’t offer a cure for intellectual uniformity.” (05/15/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/universities-best-defense-against
- The US Should Cut Its Losses in the Iran War
Source: Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland“Presidential power is now running rogue. Congress needs to push back at its roots and use the War Powers Resolution of the 1970s to end both the Iran War and the continuing War on Terror. The president’s own party is paralyzed by congressional members’ fear that an adverse tweet from Trump will end their political careers, even though there should be strength in numbers to do the right thing. However, many should be even more frightened that the American people will fire them in November if they don’t act to end this pointless war of choice now.” (05/15/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/15/cut-losses-iran-war/
- Should Presidential Pardon Power be More Restricted?
Source: Cato Institute
by Dan Greenberg“The pardon power is different from other constitutional powers. It is unchecked and absolute: There is no other branch of government that can interfere with a president’s pardons. The Constitution was created in the shadow of absolute royal power; it was designed to resist the corruption of such power. The division of government into three separate branches is meant to ensure a system of checks and balances on government power. From this perspective, the pardon power stands out: The unilateral pardon power looks like the last remaining remnant of royalism in the Constitution. … Do Donald Trump’s pardons give us good reason to change the rules of the Constitution? Is it time to put the brakes on solo pardon power? I think there are lessons to be learned from the president’s abuse of office.” (05/15/26)
https://www.cato.org/commentary/should-presidents-power-be-more-restricted
- The FDA’s New Psychedelic Rules Are Groovy, but the Agency Is Still a Bad Trip
Source: Reason
by Steven Greenhut“The federal Food and Drug Administration nannies have been tormenting Americans for decades, which is no surprise given the pitfalls of putting bureaucrats in charge of such an important function as determining the safety of our food supply, and evaluating drugs and medical devices. Frankly, it’s amazing that we all haven’t starved to death or been denied basic medications, given the FDA’s Byzantine approval process. … One of the benefits, however, of the Trump administration’s Overton-Window-shifting approach toward health policy is its lighter touch toward substances that previous administrations had approached with a prohibitionist view.” (05/15/26)
- Trying Souls
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“‘Could this be the Antichrist?’ So wondered out loud today’s most popular conservative voice … about President Donald J. Trump. That commentator, Tucker Carlson, then answered himself: ‘Well, who knows?’ Later, speaking to Lulu Garcia-Navarro with The New York Times, Mr. Carlson denied (thrice) ever verbalizing that eschatological question. Of course, as Scott Jennings points out, Tucker contextualized the matter by asserting that the president was ‘more of a hostage’ to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in deciding to go to war against Iran. ‘Seems to me it has to be one or the other,’ offered Jennings. ‘Are you a supernatural evil being or are you some weak hostage or slave to other people?'” (05/15/26)
- Hobbes’s Self-Defeating Theory
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter“Like it or not, for several centuries now, Hobbes’s nation-state concept has been the default paradigm and context for modern people whenever they think about government. Without having ever read Hobbes, people will unknowingly repeat his assumptions, presuppositions, concerns, and arguments for the state. Yet — with some simple logic and using Hobbes’s own presuppositions — we can internally critique Hobbes’s argument and see that his proposed solution of the state solves none of the problems he presents.” (05/15/26)
- AI and Comparative Advantage
Source: EconLog
by Valentin Boboc“Much of the panic around AI rests on pointing out absolute advantages. LLMs can write clearly and convincingly. They summarise large documents quickly. They generate passable Python scripts in seconds. In these discrete tasks, AI is a direct competitor. If a job is merely a collection of such tasks, the human worker is in trouble. The Ricardian challenge, however, is to identify where AI has a comparative advantage and whether this manifests itself at the job level. Comparative advantage is determined by opportunity costs. For humans, the binding constraint is time. For AI, the constraint is compute. These are very different constraints, and they are different enough to keep humans in the picture.” (05/15/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/ai-and-comparative-advantage
- US Trapped by Iran’s Resilience; Why the Solution Is Agreement, Not Attrition
Source: Antiwar.com
by Greg Pence“The central question is no longer whether the United States can inflict damage on Iran. The real question is whether such pressure is actually capable of producing Washington’s desired political outcome.An increasing number of Western analyses now suggest the answer is no. The United States and its allies are gradually realizing that they are confronting a country capable of enduring pressure, reproducing internal control, managing crises, and exporting the costs of war beyond its borders. This reality has drawn Washington into what may be called ‘the trap of Iranian resilience’ – a situation in which continued pressure no longer changes Tehran’s behavior but instead exponentially raises the costs for America itself.” (05/15/26)
